Web Dating Service Takes Scientific Approach

If the "happily" has gone out of your "happily ever after," eHarmony wants to know all about it.

The Web dating service, best known for matching couples through psychological testing, has opened a research facility to collect data about what draws people to each other — sometimes disastrously — and what holds them together through the demands of marriage and children. The team of researchers working at eHarmony Labs in Pasadena, California will study love and its biological, sociological and neurological underpinnings. The first study now under way is aimed at discovering where it all starts — the click factor. "The click factor — that's a very different factor than success in a long-term relationship, but very important," Dr. Galen Buckwalter, vice president of research and development at eHarmony, said in an interview. Finding out what causes that chemistry and predicting when it will strike is the final frontier in online dating services.

eHarmony wants to find the click factor and other keys to long-lasting marital bliss, he said."If we can find it, we can include it in our model," Buckwalter said. He was researching cognitive aging and Alzheimer's disease at the University of Southern California when he was approached in 1997 by Neil Clark Warren, a former couples counsellor and self-help author who wanted to use scientific data to match people in romantic relationships. "He had been a therapist for many years...and the primary topic that was not being addressed was selection," Buckwalter said. The two men designed the first National Study of Marriages, upon which they based eHarmony's Compatibility Matching System. The site has 14 million registered users in 250 countries. "It was slow growth at first, then it took off," Buckwalter said."It made us want to understand how to use the empirical research to help married couples."

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eHarmony claims that couples matched through its service enjoy higher marital satisfaction than the general public. Now the company plans to use its methods to develop new products for conventionally matched couples. The company competes with match.com, Yahoo Personals and other online dating services. The studies at eHarmony Lab, which will be overseen by scientists from U.S. universities, will be shared with the global research community. The labs consist of four observation rooms with state-of-the art video equipment that allow researchers to monitor facial expressions, body language, voice tone and other information. The company advertises for participants for several ongoing studies online and through universities. It is also collecting data electronically through a free "relationship tune-up" feature at eHarmony.com/labs.

Science may not be able to discover what causes the heart to pound and the palms to sweat whenever that certain someone is near, but eHarmony Labs hope to put a little more love into the world through science."We never want to take away from the pure magic of a relationship," Buckwalter said. "We're just encouraging people to take a few steps to prepare."